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Erwin Mills' Pulse Gave Life to Village:
Textile factory shaped West Durham's workers' lives
By Paul Bonner
Reproduced with permission from the Durham Herald-Sun (November 14, 2000).
The mill's heart beat in row upon row of machines that pounded and clacked in cavernous rooms where the workers who served them had to shout to be heard. Day, evening and graveyard shift, the workers came and went but the heartbeat continued.
Outside, in the village that surrounded the mill like a hive, the sound reverberated and so pervaded the workers' consciousness that they noticed it only when it ceased, making Sundays seem unnaturally still.
In the big house on the hill above the village, a boy in a second-story bedroom was lulled to sleep by the sound. He heard it as a whirring hum at night, when conversation in the house was muted and the streets outside fell silent.
The sound reassured him that while he slept, his neighbors carried on the work of the village. No one could be lonely hearing it. The sound spoke of the endurance of the mighty engine of prosperity whose parts worked together like those of a living being.
His mother's family had built that engine and stoked it with money and ingenuity. Cotton bales would keep going in one end of the complex of brick buildings and smokestacks, and sheets and pillowcases would keep coming out the other, as long as cotton grew or people slept in beds.
Or so it seemed.
The boy, Ed Watkins, is now 57. His mother, Claudia Powe Watkins, 92, is the daughter of Erwin Mills' first superintendent, Edgar Knox Powe, and the niece of the part-owner for whom it was named, William A. Erwin.
Ed Watkins believes anyone whose family worked in Erwin Cotton Mills probably feels the same way about the sound.
"I still miss it," he said.
Little remains of Erwin Cotton Mills, the factory that once was synonymous with West Durham. Just the long, brick No. 1 Mill building and the house that served as company headquarters, beside Ninth Street on Main Street.
Even there, few clues remain of the former life. The mill buildings have become apartments and offices. Ninth Street's stores that once catered to mill workers by offering staples and cheap goods have been transformed mostly into trendy restaurants and boutiques. A few clues to the village's habits and needs, however, can still be found preserved in places like McDonald's Pharmacy, whose appearance has changed little through the decades.
And in more than a few of the simple four-room cottages that Erwin Mills rented to its workers for $1 a week (comparable, non-subsidized housing rented for roughly five times that amount), former mill workers have lived since they bought them.
Irene Maynor and her husband Lacy were once among those residents, in a house at the corner of Rutherford Street and Hillsborough Road.
Maynor worked 42 years as a weaver, which meant that she operated mechanical looms, watching as many as two dozen of the machines at a time. If any of the hundreds of threads on each loom broke, as often happened, she had to retie the ends with a weaver's knot. When each heavy roll of cloth was complete, she had to "doff" it, or remove it from the machine. Later in her career, the company assigned that work to men who were known as doffers.
Now 86, Maynor no longer lives in West Durham, but in a trim apartment on Peppertree Street in northern Durham. She retired from Erwin Mills 25 years ago, but when asked, can still, with a quick twist of the hand, tie a weaver's knot in a piece of fine thread.
"You had to work fast," she said.
Cradle to grave
Maynor was paid by the "pick" -- the number of times the loom's warp threads shifted and the shuttle flew across, tracked by a counter at the top of the loom. Weavers accordingly tried to stay on the good side of their "fixer," or mechanic, since it wouldn't pay to have a malfunctioning loom. Her husband, who died in 1972, worked as a fixer.
The work was dirty, hot in the summer and noisy. Cotton lint floated in the air and covered everything and everybody like fine snow, especially in the spinning room. When Maynor spent any time in the spinning room she was racked by coughing. Years later, some workers were diagnosed with emphysema and "brown lung" disease.
After she left work each evening, her ears still rang from the noise. In the 1960s, OSHA came through and said the weavers had to wear earplugs. For many workers, it was too late.
"A lot of the older people did lose their hearing," Maynor said.
Her parents worked there also, from the time the family moved to Durham from Danville, Va., in 1933, when she was 19. She had already been working in such factories since she was 13. She started out "filling batteries" -- not electrical batteries but wheel-like contraptions that held a number of spindles of thread, called "quills," that fed the looms.
Delores Stansbury recently found in family papers her father's weekly paycheck stub from Erwin Mills, from 1941. It showed his pay as 49.2 cents an hour, with deductions of 14 cents for hospitalization insurance and 15 cents for group life insurance. His net pay for the week was $19.22, well above the average pay of about $15. Workers could also have deducted from their paychecks their rent and company-supplied coal, kerosene and ice.
In its cradle-to-grave paternal system typical of factories of the time, Erwin Mills provided its workers with entertainment and community events at its own auditorium -- which also served as a community center -- fruit baskets at Christmas and even burial plots. The Old West Durham Neighborhood Association has worked to clear out the underbrush that had grown up in decades of neglect of the old Cedar Hill Cemetery. A follow-up session, or "touch-up," is planned for this Saturday.
Company housing was modest and decent by the standards of the times, decidedly Spartan by those of today. The houses lacked insulation or foundation skirting. They had running water but most lacked bathtubs and some lacked commodes. They were heated by coal stoves and had electricity, although until well after the mid-century they lacked refrigerators. Most lots included a garage, and many workers owned a car (although, like most other people, almost no mill worker owned more than one).
Workers hung a card on their front porches to indicate to the ice deliveryman how many pounds to put in their icebox that day. No one thought of locking doors. Watkins remembers seeing on some houses do-not-disturb signs advising that a third-shift worker slept there during the day.
In the evening, workers could watch movies at Erwin Auditorium, which stood across Main Street from the mill. The building also contained a bowling alley and served as a meeting hall for a number of community organizations. The park, which featured a swimming pool, was the site of company picnics, especially each July 4. Workers received vacation time off, but took it all at the same time, when the factory would close in the summer.
Wayne Smith's father, Lewis Smith, worked in Erwin Mills 43 years, as Smith also did briefly before going into the military. Later, Wayne Smith worked 30 years in the Durham Fire Department. He was stationed part of that time in the No. 2 fire station on Ninth Street.
He remembers the light that flashed outside a factory entrance on Hillsborough Road at 6 a.m. each weekday morning. Then the gates would open for a short time and the shifts would change. Then the gates were locked again.
"If you weren't in by that time, you didn't work that day," Smith said.
On summer evenings, workers and their families sat on front porches. Neighbors gathered for conversation or a game of horseshoes or to listen to the radio together.
"That was the entertainment," Smith said.
Textiles' role large
Of Durham's old-line industries, tobacco's role is better known today than that of growing and processing cotton goods, even if the latter was older and was developed along with tobacco. In 1852, Orange Factory was built to spin and weave cloth. Orange Factory was so named because it was then the only factory in Orange County, which included present-day Durham County, according to Jean Bradley Anderson's authoritative "Durham County: A History." Where it stood is now under water at the Little River reservoir in northern Durham County.
In the 1890s, after tobacco had made millionaires of the Dukes, Julian Carr, George Watts and others, those magnates sought to diversify their interests. They looked primarily to textiles, finance and, in the Dukes' case, the new industry of electrical power.
Brodie Duke built Pearl Cotton Mills (named for his daughter). As apartments, the buildings still are in use, at the corner of Duke Street and Trinity Avenue. Later, Pearl Mills became Mill No. 6 of Erwin Mills.
Duke's half-brother Benjamin Duke in 1892 started Erwin Mills, enlisting Erwin, a scion of the textile manufacturing Holt family in Alamance County, to serve on the company's board and run the plant. Erwin put in $40,000 of the $125,000 total capitalization and was promised a 40 percent return on his investment. Duke added an incentive by proposing that the new mill be named after Erwin. Thus, the story goes, if it failed or thrived, the result would reflect on Erwin personally. Erwin Mills opened in the summer of 1893.
Previously, the area where it was built had been known as Pinhook, the name of a low grade of smoking tobacco, which reflected the area's rough and rowdy character.
Like other Durham textile mills, Erwin Mills first produced the small cloth pouches in which smoking tobacco was sold.
The Dukes continued investing in textile mills beyond Durham; the town of Erwin in Harnett County, where one such mill was located, was originally named Duke.
From the beginning in the Durham plant, Erwin and Powe saw to their workers' needs, temporal and spiritual. They set aside land for a Sunday school, the auditorium and a park with a swimming pool and baseball field (now a soccer field) behind the auditorium.
Erwin, an Episcopalian, built St. Joseph's Episcopal Church on West Main Street near the plant. Powe visited with mill hands on their front porches and gave them rose bush cuttings to plant in their yards. Some of those roses still bloom.
Monkey business
Watkins grew up in a house on Swift Avenue, which stood where that street now crosses the Durham Freeway. The E.K. Powe house still stands at the corner of Swift Avenue and Pettigrew Street. The Powe family sold it to the B.W. Roberts family, who lived there for decades before selling it to the nursing home that now occupies the former site of Erwin's home and bears its name, Hillhaven. In the 1970s, the Powe house, its upkeep much neglected, was home to students for whom its faded grandeur added to the hippie commune atmosphere they gave it.
During that time, the house became known as "Monkey Top," as a counterpart to the neighborhood of mill houses below it to the southwest called Monkey Bottom. According to one account, the latter gained its name when monkeys from a traveling circus or zoo escaped their cages and evaded recapture for some period. Residency in Monkey Bottom carried a social stigma. Cotton mill workers as a whole were sometimes pejoratively labeled, or referred to themselves, as "lint dodgers" or "lint heads."
The Powe house and nearby Sunnyside, the home of Erwin's brother Jesse Harper Erwin, have been shifted slightly on their sites and have been restored for use as offices.
For most of the century, Erwin Mills turned out sheets and pillowcases, especially during the war years, when government contracts ensured full employment. During the Depression, however, reduced hours and temporary spot layoffs were common, as attested in a series of profiles of Erwin Mills workers written in 1938 by Ida L. Moore. Families she interviewed frequently mentioned being required at times to take a few days' "rest" from their mill jobs.
Not much is known about Moore except that she wrote the sketches for the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers Project, headed by folk musicologist John Lomax. One of several social documentary series providing work for writers, photographers, sociologists and folklorists during the Depression, the Erwin Mills worker profiles can be read online at the Old West Durham Neighborhood Association's Web site. The neighborhood association has accompanied the articles with modern photographs of the houses where Moore interviewed her subjects (www.owdna.org/wpa1.htm). The Web site also contains vintage photographs and a history of Erwin Mills and the neighborhood.
Those 1930s denizens of Monkey Bottom would hardly recognize the place now. Moore found Mary Smith at home on Ninth Street, where a Lebanese restaurant now does a brisk business.
Smith told Moore how, at age 15, she came with her family from a sharecropper's shack to Durham and she went to work in the mills earning $1 for each 12-hour day's work. Like many Monkey Bottomers, she supplemented her pay by taking home tobacco bags and inserting the drawstrings with their paper tags. Whole families spent their evenings "tagging," making a few cents per thousand bags.
At a house on Broad Street that now houses Bull City Sound, Sally Dunne, half-blind and raising seven children, told Moore of her fears that her husband's drinking could get him fired from his $14-a-week job.
These profiles and others from across the United States during the Depression years also can be viewed at the Web site of the Library of Congress, where they are part of an online collection called "American Life Histories" (memory.loc.gov/ammem/wpaintro/wpahome.html).
The heartbeat stops
In counterpoint to the mill owners' paternal attitudes, labor unions demanding improved pay, hours and conditions began making inroads early in the 20th century. They made little progress, however, until the mid-century. Maynor remembers strikes in the 1940s. Union relations with the mill's management, remained cordial, however, even during two strikes in that decade.
Maynor participated in at least one strike. She recalls how strikers received vouchers for food from a commissary on Rosehill Avenue.
"When I did go back to work, they had taken my seniority away," she said. "They did a lot of them that way if they didn't go back by a certain time. My husband wanted me to stay out until the end of the strike."
Her overseer (so supervisors were called) told her he would restore her seniority if she would work six weeks on the third shift at the No. 1 mill. Her husband urged her to refuse, not wanting her to work the overnight shift. At first, she did refuse. But then she went against her husband's wishes and agreed. At the end of the assignment, she got back her seniority.
Erwin Mills merged in 1970 with Burlington Industries. In 1986, Burlington sold the factory to the J.P. Stevens Co., and the factory closed shortly thereafter. At nearly a century old, Erwin was considered outmoded and inefficient.
Within a few years the Durham Freeway was completed, bisecting the former Erwin Park and Monkey Bottom. Most of the mill buildings were demolished. On part of the site in the late 1980s the Erwin Square office building was erected.
"I didn't think I'd ever see the mills go," Smith said. "I thought they were here to stay."
Other Durham textile mills by that time had suffered the same fate, as the economic center of gravity shifted to new industries and medical centers like the Veterans Administration hospital near Erwin Mills. Jobs seeped away from the central city toward Research Triangle Park.
Even if the mills had remained, Maynor wouldn't have wanted her two daughters to work there. Her eldest daughter trained as a secretary and worked at the VA Hospital. The younger daughter worked at Liggett & Myers. They both received better pay and benefits than she did continuing working at Erwin Mills. She retired in 1975.
Nowadays, the conditions and pay she and other workers accepted would seem to most people harsh, Maynor said. At the time, most mill workers knew only others like themselves. Most saw few prospects for climbing the socioeconomic ladder. But, like the Maynors, they sought to improve their children's opportunities.
"They were good days, but I wouldn't want to go back that way," Maynor said.
© 2000 Durham Herald Company, Inc.
Ninth Street shops & Erwin Mills (ca. 1930). Courtesy of Durham Co Library.